nightmarevolution

Also at Another Hole in the Head last night (see previous entry) I saw Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. This is a really great documentary on the evolution of the horror film, starting in 1910 with the first silent film version of Dracula and continuing up to modern times, when many people are turning away from American horror films because they've just become a contest to see who can be the sickest, most graphic and sadistic. It touches on SO many films and places each in its proper chronological context. It's similar in tone and style to the IFC films documentary The American Nightmare that I love (and own a copy of), but much more ambitious and exhaustive in scope, and features new interviews by horror greats like John Carpenter, Joe Dante and George Romero.

"What does it take to kick people in the ass hard enough to wake up?" Romero asks at one point, discussing the post-Sept. 11th American political landscape.

Also one of the commentators makes note of the fact that, when you meet the men who make horror films - Carpenter, Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Eli Roth, etc - they are peaceful men, not mentally disturbed in a violent way, intelligent, politically active, liberal. "These men," the commentator states, "open themselves up to all the things other people repress, and it's the people who repress those things you have to worry about."

Good point!

Strange Symbol

Tonight, volunteering for San Francisco's horror/sci fi/cult film festival, "Another Hole in the Head," I saw a fantastic, and fantastically strange, film: Hitoshi Matsumoto's 2009 cinematic mindfuck Symbol. (A few years back he made a splash with Big Man Japan, which I missed but will see soon.)

This was one of the weirdest and most unpredictable films I've seen in recent memory. And the only one I've ever seen whose main plot elements include sushi, a man trapped in a seemingly holographic room, a toilet plunger, a key, a rope, a Mexican pro wrestler named Escargot Man, and....baby penises.

LOTS of baby penises.

I said afterwards, "That movie is a work of genius." Warped, surely - but isn't that so often true of genius?

A Taiwanese kid, a fellow volunteer, said he thinks Matsumoto was indebted to Stanley Kubrick and that the finale was a sort of homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can sort of see that, in the ending sequence.

Anyway, if you want your mind blown by something truly strange, I recommend checking out Symbol. If you're in San Francisco, it plays one more time - on Saturday the 24th, at Viz Cinema - as part of Another Hole in the Head!

Dogshit galore

J.F.C., does EVERYONE in San Francisco own a dog?

That adds up to a lot of dogshit.

By the way, if one more person tells me that dogs are loving and cats are cold and selfish, I'm going to throw fresh dogshit at them.

You can look at dogs and see that they're loving...I see them as needy and constantly in need of validation. Whereas cats, rather than being selfish and disinterested, are merely more secure in who they are.

Basically, human-dog relationships are more codependent.

Yes, this is a generalization and not true of all dogs (or all cats).

But, on the flip side - Yes, there are people who get crazy and "hoard" their cats, and end up with way too many of them, but that stereotype is of a mental illness that by no means represents the vast majority of people who own cats.

There are more domesticated cats in the U.S. than there are dogs.

Although you wouldn't know it here in my city!

Where the Wild Things Weep

“I like the way you destroy stuff, good technique, there’s a spark to your work that can’t be taught.”

So says one of the Wild Things to Max in the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. I fancy the makers of this film had high hopes of it being something like the Wizard of Oz of our time. Spike Jonze directed; Dave Eggers co-wrote the screenplay; Tom Hanks is a co-producer. Catherine Keener plays Max's careworn mother. The Wild Things - portly, ramshackle muppet-monsters - are voiced by well-known actors like James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano. And the soundtrack features songs by Karen O and various other musical hip-stars. It's all very cool. And it's awfully emo. There's a lot of intimate talking, sharing of secrets, sensitivity to other peoples' shortcomings. There are times when it feels like a therapy session. I enjoyed it, but it didn't have quite the impact I wanted. Whether that's due to the shortcomings of the film or to my own status as a jaded, cynical adult, I can't say for sure.

Generally, when adapting a book into a film, I think it's best to maintain as much fidelity as possible to the source material. The problem with this film, of course, is that the source material is a slim, succinct children's book with nowhere near enough dialogue or action to fill an hour-and-a-half movie. The screenwriters had to fill all that extra space with their own imaginations, and unfortunately, their imaginations aren't nearly equal to that of Maurice Sendak.

I was going to say "Jim Henson has nothing on the Wild Things," but then I read this article stating that it was the Jim Henson Creature Shop that was behind their creation. Call it a muppet monopoly!

One gripe: the film missed my favorite detail about the book as a child: the way Max's room grows, over the course of three pages, into a moonlit forest wilderness!

Tosh-point-Bullshit

There's a new media "personality" who has displaced both Perez and Paris Hilton as the most noisome, aggravating, idiotic and annoying figure on television...it's Daniel Tosh, whose "comedy" seems to be really thriving on Comedy Central of late. (I run into it when I flip to that channel early to watch The Daily Show.) He is German. He is physically attractive. He is hot. But his material is absolutely moronic and his comments on it drag it even lower than it is to begin with. And his audience and their stupid canned laughter seem so fake. Why is this guy still on ANY channel, let alone Comedy Central, which is supposed to specialize in things that are actually funny? His jokes and video clips are all of the lamest, most anti-intellectual, sensational variety, and his comments on them are so insipid they make Joel McHale on The Soup look like a genius. Is this an experiment to see how low American audiences are willing to go?

Pop culture does NOT have to be brainless tabloid fodder with absolutely no redeeming artistic value. The great thing about Pop Art was the ART.

It's shit like this that makes me mourn the loss of great comedians of the past like Richard Pryor and George Carlin all the more.

Here comes the fog again...

Some people who live in San Francisco complain about the fog, but those people are fools. The fog is one of my favorite things about this beautiful city - and there's no shortage of things to like about San Francisco. Sure, I love a sunny warm day (like today) as much as anyone - I love to get a little color in my pale Anglo-Saxon skin. But I don't whine and gripe when we're fogged in, which happens pretty regularly on top of Mt. Davidson where I live now (until I move into my own condo at year's end). I love the eerie, ethereal quality it imparts to reality - I feel that it's my own imagination, the interior of my mind, made visible.

Sometimes it's as thick as cotton wool, and we could be living in the midst of a dense rain forest, for all we can see of our surroundings when looking out the living room windows.

A dinner guest last night said, "I don't know of any other city that has fog like this." Someone suggested, "London," but even in London the fog doesn't persist the way it does here - sometimes lasting all day, or even days on end, without ever letting up.

But you won't hear this tiger complain...

The Goddess

At the recommendation of one of my new roommates, I'm watching The Goddess, a 1958 film (dir: John Cromwell) starring Kim Stanley, who was better known as a stage actress - this was her first film role. The movie is reportedly based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, but it was released four years before Monroe's death.

Stanley's performance is top-notch, to say the least.

Sometimes I feel that I really love old movies, and other times I feel that I love the idea of old movies, but the reality of actually sitting down and watching them - well, let's just say I like to multi-task while they're playing. This is a case in point.